Smoke and Mirrors (6 page)

“If you'd been a better mother — if you'd instilled some common sense into your son — he may
have been ...”

“Normal” is the word my father did not say. He paused right there in the heat of battle, as if realizing for the first time that I was still in the room.

“You bastard,” my mother said, stealing a look at me as if she were coming to my defence. “How dare you!” She had both volume and resonance in her voice. My father looked like he had just stepped in a cow pie. He threw down his chopsticks and left the room.

For many years after my skateboard accident (which I refer to as my “lobotomy,” although the term is not really accurate) I wondered if my parents would have been better off without me in their lives. I often believed myself to be the cause of their unhappiness. Lying in bed at night, I wondered if there was some better place for me to be — better for them, better for me. So, thanks to some serious book study, I would astrally project myself, leaving my body and travelling up this long silvery thread into the night sky and off to anywhere I wanted to go.

Sometimes that took me to a beach in Australia where it was daytime and there were lots of well-tanned girls and many friendly and wise young men surfers who liked me. They said things like “Fair dinkum” to anything I said. I wanted to surf badly and asked to borrow a board. “Sure, mate,” one bushy-headed blonde guy said. “Go get tubed.”

But every time my big toe touched the sea, I was yanked back into my body on the other side of the planet.

I woke up early the next day and walked to school, down the old railway track hiking trail. I expected Andrea to appear, but she did not. At school, however, I saw her at the far end of the hall and she waved, but as I approached she walked away. I found my locker and fumbled with my books. Some days my mind is clear about school — where to go when, which books to take. Today was not one of those days. I looked at my schedule taped to my locker door; I selected the books I needed. And then I looked up and realized Tanya Webb was standing there. She was smiling.

“I have a report to write about Druids for Hist. Civ. class and I don't know where to begin. I was wondering if you might help.”

The fortune cookie was right.

“I'd love to. The Druids built Stonehenge, you know?” This was my version of flirtation. I realize it was not typical of Stockton High, but a door had opened here into another dimension — the dimension of encounters with the opposite sex.

“That's in England isn't it?”

“Sure. The Druids were Celts.”

“Were they short?”

“Not necessarily. You shouldn't mix up Druids and dwarfs.”

Tanya just smiled, and I pinched myself to see if I was really in school or still home in bed, imagining all this.

Then I saw Andrea standing behind Tanya. Andrea waved but slid her fingers across her mouth like it was a zipper, reminding me not to say anything out loud to her. Andrea had tweaked something in Tanya's mind to make her feel kindly towards me.

“Let's meet in the public library after school, okay?” I boldly said. The bell was about to ring.

“Sure. See you then,” Tanya said and walked on. I just stood there and watched her walk. She did it extremely nicely.

“That went well,” Andrea said.

“Did you do that?”

“I knew she had a paper on Druids and figured here was a window.”

“A window?”

“An opportunity. Remember, I'm here to help you.”

“You're here to help me with girls?”

“I'm here to help you in general. You are a loner, Simon. You spend too much time by yourself, too much time inside your head.”

“It's true. Anyway, I appreciate it. Are you coming with me to class?”

“Which one?”

I had forgotten already. Rats. I had to look at my schedule again and realized that it was Thursday. “Math. And I didn't do the homework.”

“Let's go.”

Mr. Michaels nailed me not five minutes into the class. “Simon, do problem 3 on page 147. At the board.”

Many other teachers took pity on me and didn't send me to the board. Not Michaels. Humiliation was his forte.

I got out of my seat and carried my book to the front of the class. Andrea was right behind me. I wrote the long equation on the chalkboard and didn't have a clue as to where to begin to find out what X equalled. I took a deep breath and began to turn to look at Mr. Michaels and give him my long-practised and well-rehearsed shrug when Andrea took my arm and began to move my hand.

I giggled. The class laughed. Michaels scowled. “Get serious,” a voice said.

I cleared my throat and pretended to be studying the equation. I moved letters and numbers from one side of the equation to the other. I crossed some things out. There appeared to be multiplication and division involved. I seemed to know what to do with the parenthesis. And then, suddenly, I had discovered that X equalled Y minus 19.

My hand set the chalk down. Andrea let go, but I could still feel a kind of energy radiating in my hand from where she had held it. I turned around. Michaels looked puzzled. “That is correct,” he said flatly, “although I wouldn't have done those steps quite in that order.”

I sat back down in my seat and Mr. Michaels picked the next victim — Parker, who was looking a little pale.

Andrea stood by the window through the rest of math but vanished again when I wasn't looking at her. I didn't see her again until lunch. Tanya waved at me from a table where she was sitting with her friends. I waved back but decided I would blunder if I tried to sit with her and those other girls. Instead, I sat alone with my tray of meat loaf and macaroni, my can of Dr. Pepper, and my thoughts. And then someone touched my elbow. I turned and there she was.

I told her about Lydia, and she didn't seem too pleased. “You asked her about me?”

“I have a hard enough time figuring out basic stuff. You are something quite unusual. Unique. I needed some thoughts from someone I trust.”

Andrea seemed a little hurt. “You don't trust me?”

“What's there not to trust? You make a girl like me. You save my ass at the board in math. I've known Lydia for a long time. She's my friend.”

“Maybe she's the one that you shouldn't trust. I don't believe in psychics or people who claim to talk to
spirits,” Andrea said.

That was a twist. I decided not to ask her why an appearing and vanishing girl did not believe in psychics or mediums. “Okay. But she's a good friend. As you've noticed, I don't have many.”

“You want to be voted most popular for the yearbook?”

“No thanks.”

“Okay. Just be careful what you say about me and to whom. I'm in a kind of vulnerable position and I'm still new at this.”

That's when I realized that some of the kids noticed I was talking out loud to no one. I had only been whispering and I had been covering my mouth so I didn't look so obvious, but I guess it was still pretty apparent.

I looked into Andrea's eyes and repeated her gesture — finger across the mouth. Keep it zipped.

Then I looked around the room. A few people were staring. I smiled at them like everything was normal. I would have to keep my wits about me. I would have to be more careful.

In the split second when I had looked away from her, Andrea was gone. She had either gotten up and run off or she had vanished into thin air, and I was left alone with my cold meat loaf and a new sense of confusion, enough to send me back to my locker to check my schedule to figure out where I had to go next. I realized
I might have to make it through the rest of the day on my own.

For the rest of the school day I was on my own. And I did wonder often where Andrea went. Was it a matter of geography, of time, of different planes of existence? Or was she still
there
? Could she simply control who could see her and when?

I should have been nervous about my after-school meeting with Tanya but I wasn't. I was in fortune cookie mode. I had good planets in the right houses. I had Andrea influencing Tanya's interest in me. I figured I was pretty much just along for the ride. And it was about time.

My interest in girls had always been there, but it seemed like a lost cause. I was a kid with many labels — some polite, some not. Oddly enough I was rarely a victim. Guys didn't pick on me because of the way I am. If someone made fun of me for saying something stupid in class, I laughed along with everyone else. I
learned a long time ago that the best self-defence is sometimes no defence at all. Laugh at yourself when they are laughing at you and you defuse their power.

Andrea, on my behalf, had changed Tanya's view of me from peculiar to interesting. If you think about it, the two aren't that far apart. I wanted to thank Andrea, but she wasn't anywhere to be seen at school at the end of the day, so I walked down the street to the library and there was Tanya sitting at a table alone. I saw her through the window and my heart leaped in my chest. “Just try to avoid acting like an idiot,” I counselled myself. At least I assume it was me giving advice to myself in my head. “Be cool,” the voice said. “Like ice,” I replied.

Tanya was doodling in her notebook.

“Hi,” I said.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

I sat down. “So you're interested in Druids?”

She nodded. “Well, I'm curious. They seem so mysterious. But I don't know where to begin ... my research, I mean.”

“We could get a few books.”

Tanya seemed to think that using the computer to look up the call numbers of books and then actually finding the books was brilliant on my part. It wasn't like rocket science, but maybe she was just trying to be nice to me.

“I really appreciate you helping me.”

“Sure. No problem. In fact, first let me tell you what I already know about Druids.”

My head was stuffed with an encyclopaedia of information regarding the occult, mysticism, the paranormal. What I had read stayed with me — almost all of it. But I couldn't retrieve it easily. I suppose it had something to do with the brain damage. In order to remember things, I would have to use memory tricks. For example, if I closed my eyes and pretended I was in the desert, and then started looking for something by digging in the sand, I would find what I was looking for. Or I could imagine I was on a lake and go fishing for an answer with a fishing pole. And find it.

Tanya studied my face as I closed my eyes. I went to a rocky coastline this time. It looked like Cornwall in England, and I was looking for a stone that had the dope on Druids. It was just beneath a high cliff with a cascading waterfall.

“The Druids were like religious leaders, healers some of them. I think they cured sick people with herbs and plants. They worshipped the sun and they believed in the immortality of the soul.”

I could open my eyes now and remember more once I had started to tap into the information in my memory. Tanya was taking notes. She had the most beautiful handwriting I'd ever seen — like flowers in a garden. “What do you think about the immortality of
the soul?” I asked her, thinking this was a clever segue into getting to know her better.

She stopped writing. “I don't know what you mean.” I realized I was not very good at small talk with girls. “I was just wondering if you thought we lived on after we died or what.”

“Wow,” she said. “That's a big question. I guess something must happen. What do you think?”

I swallowed. I should probably not go there. I had seven different theories, all quite plausible, about what happens when you die, but if I were to tell Tanya, I figured it would be the end of our “friendship.” So I just said, “I think the soul lives on.”

“Cool,” she said, pleased with the brevity of my answer.

“So the Druids lived in France and southern England. They built monuments to the sun — like Stonehenge, for example, where they set up a circle of very large stones.”

“But I thought they were quite short.”

“Not necessarily, although I think everybody was shorter in those days. And they didn't live as long as we do.”

“That's too bad. But do you think they had any fun?”

Hmm. I didn't know if the Druids had any fun. They seemed kind of serious from what I read, but I hoped they had fun so I made something up. “They
had lots of parties and drank a concoction made from fermented honey. And they had great music.”

How could the Druids
not
have had great music? Tanya was back to taking notes, but I'd been distracted from my memory search. I closed my eyes again and saw some Druids dancing on a cliff above the waterfalls. Oh boy.

“The Druids were the religious leaders of people called the Celts — that's with a C — and they held worship ceremonies in sacred groves. They had fires and burned things as sacrifices. They worshipped the sun, but they believed the earth too had sacred powers and some Druids could feel the energy along certain paths. Some Druids could use willow branches to find water deep under the earth.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

“I read a lot of books.”

“I read mostly magazines. But this is really great stuff.” She looked at me so sweetly I thought I would melt, but she seemed almost sleepy and I think she was stifling a yawn.

I didn't know what else to do but ramble on some more about Stonehenge and the sun worship, and when all I had left was stuff about fertility rituals I told her, “Fertility of the earth and people were intermingled in the Druids' religion. Some plants were considered to have powers to make women more fertile
— you know, so they could have sex and have more babies.”

Tanya was dutifully taking notes. “Mistletoe, for example — the berries were said to represent human male sperm. It was considered a sacred plant to the Druids. In fact, the custom of kissing beneath mistletoe at Christmas is like a leftover from some Druid ritual involving mistletoe.” But that was as far as I was willing to explain anything about fertility rites.